“She must stay.” To my amazement, it was Antonia who jumped to my defense. “Eugenie gave specific instruction that Damoselle de Vernase attend her in this bedchamber. Many have heard this. Duplais? Ilario?”
Both men acknowledged her accuracy. I was speechless. But then, she had already demonstrated her intentions of keeping me under her control, dead or otherwise.
“Until she wakes to contradict them, my daughter will expect her wishes to be heeded. She has come to love and trust Anne, despite her initial uncertainties. And Anne’s husband has granted his permission for her to continue in her duties.”
“Husband?” Baldwin and Ilario chimed together. Their gawking made me wish to crawl under a table.
“Lacking certain minor formalities, yes. Damoselle Anne is betrothed to my son-in-law’s Commander of the Northern Passes.”
“My goodfather’s consent is hardly a minor formality,” I said, but I didn’t think anyone heard.
Baldwin recognized when argument was impossible. “Your will, of course, Your Grace,” he said, inclining his back, “as long as there are
two
in attendance at all times.”
“If I may, my lords and ladies,” said Duplais, hands behind his back as if wholly unfazed at the discussion of poisonings and hauntings and incipient husbands. “Upon hearing of this dire event, I took the liberty of dispatching a palace messenger bird to His Majesty’s current sojourn at Castelle Dureme. I’ve been awaiting the king’s response.” He offered Philippe’s First Counselor a curling slip of paper.
Antonia snatched it from Lord Baldwin’s hand. Her stretched forehead burnt so deep a scarlet, I thought the skin must char and split. She crumpled the slip, threw it on the floor, and returned to the bedchamber.
Ilario retrieved it, read it, and passed it on to me.
Castelle Dureme. For a determined rider, three days.
CHAPTER 31
24 OCET, LATE EVENING
T
hroughout that night and the next day, Eugenie’s condition changed little. Though she remained fevered and insensible, she seemed ever on the verge of waking. We kept her comfortable, stroking her throat until she swallowed so we could feed her bread soaked in milk and Roussel’s medicines. At times she grew restless, trying to throw off the sheets and her bedgown, arching her back, and rubbing her breasts and nether regions. We bathed her face and limbs with cool water.
An elderly serving woman—Prince Desmond’s old milk nurse, Mailine—came willingly out of her retirement to taste everything brought in for the queen. Mailine, a stick figure of a woman, dry as dust, spent her waking hours tatting lace with quick, capable hands. She sat in the doorward’s chamber and slept in the alcove.
Duplais had made out a schedule for Antonia, Ilario, Eleanor, Patrice, himself, and me—two of us to be with the queen at all times. He had assigned either Ilario, himself, or me as one of each pairing, as we three were by far the youngest. Unfortunately it meant I was never alone with one of my allies. Likely that was his intent, which annoyed me to no end.
On the first morning of our new arrangements, Duplais and I reviewed a small change in the schedule. “Are you well?” he murmured without lifting his eyes from the page. “A swordsman friend believed you might have suffered an injury yesterday.”
“Well enough.” Which was wholly untrue. My arm felt like a smith was trying to heat and hammer it into a sword. But I wasn’t going to waste this time. “I’ve so much to tell you.”
“Later. I promise.” Lady Patrice was bearing down on us. Duplais snatched up his paper. “I’ll have a new copy made for you and each of those named.”
Though Physician Roussel was not named on Duplais’ schedule, he had not left Eugenie’s side throughout the long night and day. He displayed a gentle hand but grew increasingly exasperated with his own inability to cool the queen’s fever. None could have missed his sidewise glances at Dante, who drifted in and out at random times, offering naught that anyone could see.
“She’ll wake when she’s ready,” said the mage on one of his visits, a pale white glow from his staff illuminating the sleeping lady. “Perhaps she’s fed up with all this aristo nattering and enjoys her fevered dreaming. I’d estimate she’ll sleep until . . . the Souleater’s Return.” Somehow in his mouth the common phrasing of world’s end took on a dread reality.
By nightfall Lady Patrice insisted Roussel retire for a few hours, lest he exact more harm than good on his charge. Though I myself had caught only a few hours of sleep in a chair, I added my voice to hers. “Physician Roussel could stretch out on a couch in the salon, could he not, my lady? There he would be instantly accessible.”
With only a slight disapproving sniff, the marquesa agreed. After extracting our sworn oaths that we would summon him if we detected the slightest change for better or worse, the physician latched his satchel, looped its strap over his shoulder, and withdrew.
HOURS LATER, DEEP IN THE night watch, Patrice and I relinquished our oaths, our linen cloths, and our bedside stools to Ilario and Lady Antonia. Pinched lips painted a startling red, garments stiff and regal, Antonia would have better suited a throne room than a sickroom. She kissed me on each cheek. “So devoted you are,
caeri
. My daughter will be so grateful when she wakes.”
I’d scarce left the bedchamber when Ilario came pelting after me. “Damoselle, your kerchief !”
He passed me a square of lacework that would cost Bernard’s wages for a year. “It’s not—”
I was halfway through my denial when I realized that a tightly folded scrap of paper had been deposited into my hand along with the linen.
“This is Her Majesty’s,” I said, returning the kerchief while slipping the pellet-sized wad into my pocket. He bowed and returned to the bedchamber.
I lagged behind Lady Patrice, long enough to step into a lamp-lit closet and unfold the scrap of paper. A dry, dusty pellet fell into my hand. The strong, unelaborated script on the paper was the same as on the bedchamber schedule. Duplais’.
A mild dosage of common hypericum can cause dizziness and confusion. Not bleeding or fever.
Recalling Ilario’s exuberant dance with Antonia and its untidy ending, I supposed the chevalier had palmed one of the medicaments. So much for my assumptions. Perhaps the hemorrhage was nature’s work after all. Or perhaps only one pastille had been laced with some devilish compound.
Confused and uncertain I hurried tiredly down the passage in Patrice’s wake, supporting my painful left arm in my right. I hoped I was so spry as the brisk marquesa when I was in my eighth decade, if not so mean-spirited.
Never had I been so unsure of what future awaited me. Did I carry Mondragon magic in my veins? Was it true that the rocky slopes of Gurmeddion damped the talents of the blood? To someone like Lianelle or my friend of the mind such a fate would surely feel like suffocation. My own suffocation would be of another kind.
My head a muddle of faces, fears, and the day’s bloody images, my stomach churning, I rounded the corner into the long passage.
“Damoselle.”
Cold sweat rippled across my skin as fingers plucked at my sleeve. A man’s figure stepped from the shadows. I jerked away, slamming my back to the passage wall and fumbling for my knife.
“Physician!” The pooled lamplight revealed Roussel’s intelligent gray eyes and his black curls threaded with white. Ghostly kings, the Aspirant, Dante, assassins . . . there were a number of men I’d no wish to encounter in the night watches.
“Shhh.” He drew me into the Rose Room and closed the door behind us. A single lamp burned on the writing desk. “Wouldn’t want anyone to catch a m-maid of the royal b-bedchamber having a middle-night assignation with the stammering physician.”
“You’ve no idea how close you were to having my dinner on your shoes, sonjeur. You should be sleeping. And so should I. I can scarce summon a thought.” My eyes stung. The lamp’s flame seemed to heighten the stink of herbs and incense that clung to our clothing.
“But you said you needed to c-consult me. Friends are rare in this place just now.”
I cradled my arm, its incessant throbbing but one misery amid overwhelming exhaustion. “This can likely wait.” Though my friend had advised not. Pleasure at the remembrance of his concern heated my cheeks.
“The arm, yes? I’ve noticed you favoring it all day. And you seem fevered. How did you injure it?”
“It got tangled in a rope this morning,” I said. “Yesterday morning. Accidentally.”
The physician settled me in the padded chair, turning it around where I could rest my arm on the writing table. He drew up a stool for himself, pulled on a pair of spectacles, and unlaced my sleeve. Rusty blood streaked the linen winding. As he unpinned and unwrapped the bandage, his every touch made me wince.
“Tangled in a rope? Accidentally?” He stared down at my battered limb—swollen, purple flesh scored by at least ten angular lacerations—thin black lines bordered by angry red. “My d-dear young lady, do you think I am an imbecile?”
His skeptical expression as he glanced over the top of his spectacles sparked an unlikely inclination to laugh. My head spun. The lamplight swelled and receded. “Perhaps it was not accidental. Have you experience with magical injuries?”
“I’ve seen very few injuries that could not be explained by simple science or stupidity,” he said. “B-but, then, I took up medical studies only in the past few years, so I can’t claim d-decades of experience.” The physician produced a magnifying lens from his satchel and examined my chevronlike injuries. Brow knotted, he probed gently with a thin bronze implement. “And truthfully, I’ve never seen anything qu-quite like this. There appear to be . . . fibers . . . embedded in the lacerations, yet they—”
He pulled out several more implements, some squares of clean linen, and a mounting mechanism for the magnifying lens. With both hands free, he peered through his lens and used tweezers and a small blade to probe one particularly angry wound.
“Hold very still, damoselle. This may sting.”
Tired as I was, every prick felt like a sword cut. But I held still. Before very long, Roussel picked a sheet of writing paper from the stack and deposited something on it. He shifted the focus of his magnifier to the paper and invited me to look through the lens.
A black fiber, a few millimetres in length, was clearly visible on the cream-colored paper. Roussel passed me one of his probes. “Use that to touch it.”
I did so, and the hairlike thread curled like a live thing. And then it uncurled and lay still, no matter how I poked it. But when I touched the fiber with my finger, it writhed and stung and adhered to my flesh until Roussel picked it off with his tweezers and scraped it back onto the page. I shuddered and scrubbed at my fingertip.
“
Rope
, you said? ” The physician dabbed at the bead of blood that marked the site of his probing. “How in the name of all d-daemons did
that
get into your arm in Castelle Escalon?”
“From a crossbow bolt,” I said, mesmerized by the black thread, even after he shifted the lens mount back into place and began to probe another wound. “The bedeviled rope was attached. I’d gone out to meet a friend.”
His hands stilled. “A friend who brought attackers with crossbows?”
His kind efforts deserved an answer. “The attackers were after him, not me.”
“Stars’ glory, why? Was he—? Oh.” He swallowed his question in such a hurry, he almost choked. He bent his head to the work. “P-pardon. Not polite to pry into family secrets at such an hour of the morning,” he said softly, extracting a third and fourth remnant of the black cords in quick succession.
“He was
not
my brother.”
“Of course.” I could see only his thick curls as he bobbed his head in acceptance.
But the ensuing silence pricked at me. “A young man came to tell me that my sister had killed herself apurpose. He didn’t think it something to write in a letter.”
“Ah, damoselle, I’d heard of your tragic loss.” Roussel’s sympathy threatened to sap my anger. I couldn’t afford to wallow in guilt and grief.
“Unfortunately he could not tell me why. Or who pursued him with such weapons as this. Perhaps he has family enemies.” Perhaps . . . though I knew it was no such thing.
“Did your friend survive?”
“I don’t know. We took different paths to get away.” Trusting Roussel with my life was one thing; trusting him with Guerin’s was another. He seemed to understand that.
“Whoever he was, I’ll say he has w-wicked enemies. You’re going to tell me this is sorcery, aren’t you, and not some alchemical marvel ignited by the temperature of your skin?” Another black fiber dropped onto the paper.
“I’ve lost sight of the line between science and magic,” I confessed. “But the cord is Mage Dante’s work. I saw a coil of it in his laboratorium today.”
This time shock popped his head up. “Stars above us, what were you doing
there
?”